|
Untitled Document
|
|
|
SORCERER'S APPRENTICE AND OTHER ORCHESTRAL FAVOURITES |
|
|
Composer: |
Carl Maria von Weber, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Jean Sibelius, Bedrich Smetana, Paul Dukas, George Enescu, Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov |
Artist: |
Maria Larionoff |
Conductor: |
Arturo Toscanini, Kenneth Jean, Erich Kleiber, Hans Vonk, Klaus-Peter Hahn, John Barbirolli, Vaclav Talich, Anthony Bramall, Oliver Dohnanyi, Arthur Fagen, Stephen Gunzenhauser, Ondrej Lenard, Jorma Panula, Petri Sakari, Kenneth Schermerhorn, Constantin Silvestri, Andras Korodi, Osmo Vanska, Carl Schuricht, Antoni Wit, Barry Wordsworth, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Thomas Beecham, Gerard Schwarz, Matyas Antal, Kees Bakels, Pietari Inkinen, Jos van Immerseel, Alexander Mikhailov, Eiji Oue |
Choir: |
Slovak Philharmonic Chorus |
Orchestra: |
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Budapest Symphony Orchestra, Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Weimar Staatskapelle, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, NBC Symphony Orchestra, Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, Lahti Symphony Orchestra, CSR Symphony Orchestra, Bratislava, Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Turku Philharmonic Orchestra, Berlin State Opera Orchestra, New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, Halle Orchestra, Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra , Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, Moscow State Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, Anima Eterna Orchestra |
Label: |
Naxos |
Catalogue No.: |
8.554066 |
Format: |
CD |
Barcode: |
0636943406625 |
|
The Sorcerer's
Apprentice and Other Orchestral Favourites
Carl Maria von Weber,
the honorific 'von' acquired in doubtful circumstances by his unreliable
father, was a cousin of Constanze Weber, the girl Mozart married in a match of
which his father greatly disapproved. It had seemed that Weber himself might be
a second Mozart, showing obvious musical abilities as a child, when he
travelled with his father's theatrical company, and embarking on an ambitious
career as a conductor, when he was appointed Kapellmeister at Breslau at the
age of eighteen. After various vicissitudes, he was able to establish himself
as a virtuoso pianist, an innovative conductor and a composer of stature,
before his early death in London in 1826. The rondo-brillant known in
English as Invitation to the Dance was written for the piano in 1819 and
dedicated to his wife Caroline. The work is a miniature drama in which a
gentleman approaches a lady, asking for her hand in the next dance, a request
that she eventually grants. They talk together, both with increasing warmth,
and then dance, exchanging conversation as they move forward together. They
dance. He thanks her, and they part. Invitation to the Dance was
orchestrated by Hector Berlioz for performance in Paris when Weber's opera Der
Freischütz (The Marksman) was staged there.
George Enescu shares a
double distinction, as a leading violinist in his generation and as the most
outstanding of Romanian composers. He was born in 1881 at Liveni, in Moldavia,
the son of an estate-manager, and had his first violin lessons at the age of
four from a gypsy fiddler, playing by ear, before his obvious talent
necessitated professional advice and attention, leading to his admission to the
Vienna Conservatory in1888, at the age of eight. His later career brought him
an international reputation as one of the greatest violinists of his time and
as a remarkable teacher. Based in Paris, he nevertheless continued his
connection with his own country, where his musical influence remained
considerable. As a composer Enescu has too often been cast as a nationalist,
using folk material. This is, in general, an unsatisfactory summary of his very
varied work. Nevertheless his popular reputation abroad, to his regret, has
depended largely on his Romanian Rhapsodies. In the first of
these he makes use of a series of folk-melodies, the first of which he may well
have learned from his gypsy teacher. Written in 1901, the two Rhapsodies weave
together with skill the original material and won immediate popularity.
The Flight of the
Bumble-Bee has provided
virtuoso material for instrument after instrument, from the violin to the tuba
and double bass. The bee in question appears in Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The
Tale of Tsar Saltan, of his famous son and mighty hero Prince Guidon
Saltanovich and of the beautiful Swan Princess, where its flight serves as
an entr'acte. In Pushkin's verse-tale it is Prince Guidon who takes the form of
a bee, observes the happenings at his father's palace, from which he and his
mother were expelled a t his birth, and stings his mother's wicked sisters and
the old match-maker who had caused their troubles. First staged in 1900, the
opera was written to celebrate the centenary of Pushkin's birth in 1899.
Goethe's poem Der
Zauberlehrling (‘The Sorcerer's Apprentice’) must, for one generation at
least, be associated with the images of Walt Disney's film Fantasia, which
imposes the picture of Mickey Mouse on the apprentice, unable to control the
magic powers he has unleashed. The story itself is graphically illustrated in
the music of the French composer Paul Dukas, a symphonic scherzo written in
1897, a work that has provided a fertile ground for analysis in its symmetrical
thematic construction. The magic unleashed by the apprentice to do his work for
him is eventually controlled by the retttrn of the sorcerer himself.
Born in 1811 in
Raiding, near Sopron, the son of an estate-manager in the service of Haydn's
patrons, the Esterházy family, Franz Liszt showed prodigal talent as a child
and was taken by his parents to Vienna for piano lessons with Czerny and then
to Paris. His subsequent career was at first as a virtuoso pianist, a life of
constant travel, concerts and popular adulation. This was followed in 1848 by a
change of career and of mistress. In Paris he had been associated with Countess
Marie d'Agoult, the mother of his three children, a liaison that had made
removal from Paris necessary. In 1848 he settled in Weimar as Director of Music
Extraordinary to the Grand Duchy, accompanied now by the young heiress, the
Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, a woman separated from her Russian husband. In 1861
he moved to Rome, embarking on what he described finally as a three-pronged
existence, with involvement in Rome in the music of the Church, in Weimar as an
influential teacher and in his native Hungary now acknowledged as a national
hero. Liszt's association with Hungary is reflected in various compositions,
not least the nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies, piano works that reproduce
not the folk-music of Hungary but the music composed by gypsies for the
entertainment of their employers and patrons. Liszt made a colourfu1
orchestration of his Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.
In 1829 the young
Felix Mendelssohn, son of a prosperous banker now settled in Berlin, and a man
of precocious talent in many directions, travelled with his friend Carl
Klingemann to Scotland, visiting Holyrood Palace, and remembering there the
events that had befallen Mary Queen of Scots, and then moving north to the
Highlands. Taking ship from Oban, Mendelssohn and his friend visited Mull,
possibly the true inspiration for his Hebrides Overture. The voyage to
Iona and to the deserted basalt rock formations of Staffa, with the
magnificence of Fingal's Cave, found Mendelssohn sea-sick, his chief memory of
the trip. By 1832, after various revisions, he had completed his overture in
its final form, a work that he had originally called Die einsame Insel (The
Lonely Island), thinking, perhaps, of Mull. His publishers preferred the more
dramatic and Ossianic echoes of Fingal's Cave and it is true that the
sea round the Hebrides does not remain calm throughout Mendelssohn's musical
voyage.
Finnish national music
found its greatest champion in Jean Sibelius, a symphonist who turned his
attention also to a series of symphonic poems, many of them based on legends
from the early Finnish sagas. Finlandia arose from music provided for
press pension celebrations in 1899, an occasion for an expression of patriotic
loyalty in the face of threatened Russian interference in the affairs of
Finland. The music written for the original pageant was revised the following
year, to form the present familiar concert work.>
Nationalism is at the
heart of the cycle of symphonic poems by the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana, Má
Vlast (‘My Country’). As elsewhere in Europe, feelings of national
identity, associated with other revolutionary ideas, had made a marked
appearance by the middle of the nineteenth century, most notably in the year of
revolutions, 1848, when there had been a rising also in Prague. Smetana,
German-speaking, nevertheless identified himself with the cause of Czech
nationalism and moved in 1856 to Sweden, returning to Prague in 1861, after
various cultural concessions had been made by the government in Vienna. The second
symphonic poem of the cycle, Vltava (Moldau), written in 1874, shows the
great river that flows through the Bohemian countryside to Prague, passing, on
its way, villages and farms, woodland and the scenes of historic events in the
history of the country.
|